Month: December 2018

Millions of users of Amazon‘s Echo speakers have grown accustomed to the soothing strains of Alexa, the human-sounding virtual assistant that can tell them the weather, order takeout and handle other basic tasks in response to a voice command.

So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.

Like this:

Todd Christopher Kohlhepp (born March 7, 1971) is an American serial killer, convicted of killing seven people in South Carolina between 2003 and 2016. https:ko-fi.com/crimevault – You can buy me a coffee Music: “Spacial Harvest” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

As a member of a group of daredevil Caltech scientists aptly known as the Suicide Squad in the 1930s and ’40s, John Whiteside Parsons helped usher in the Space Age with his combustible rocket fuel formulations.

Along the way, Parsons, who studied chemistry at USC Dornsife but never earned a degree, co-founded not only one of the first rocket companies but the prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Every space shuttle was thrust into orbit by fuel that was derived from his work.

Charming, brilliant and always nattily dressed, he was widely considered one of the most important figures of the U.S. space program.

Like this:

A rural Alabama police department that used social media to scold community members for rejecting God is coming under fire from a group that opposes mixing government and religious faith.

A statement posted on Facebook by the Opp Police Department on Tuesday blames a spike in area homicides on the idea that young people have turned away from God and “embraced Satan.” The post followed two gunshot killings in as many days in Covington County, located on the Alabama-Florida line.

Like this:

The anti-humanism is flowing hard and fast these days. I just reported on a piece published in Science decrying “human supremacism.” Now, the New York Times has published a piece arguing in favor of human extinction.

Professor of philosophy (of course!) Todd May believes that we should go the way of the dodo because we are “the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.” Never mind that animals cause each other suffering, which May recognizes. We cause by far the most, so away with us!

As fascinating and as ultimately mystifying as a giant squid in a cocktail dress, what shall we make of Kenneth Grant? I know few occultists without at least a passing interest in his work, and I know fewer still who would profess to have the first idea what he is on about. What he is on. To open any Grant text following his relatively lucid Magical Revival is to plunge into an information soup, an overwhelming and hallucinatory bouillon of arcane fact, mystic speculation and apparent outright fantasy, as appetising (and as structured) as a dish of Gumbo. The delicious esoteric fragments tumble past in an incessant boil of prose, each morsel having the authentic taste of magic, each entirely disconnected from the morsel which preceded it. Sometimes it seems as if inferior ingredients have been included, from an unreliable source: the occult data and the correspondences that simply fail to check out when investigated, knowledge that appears to have been channelled rather than researched. Doubtful transmissions from the Mauve Zone.

Spicing this delirious broth, characteristically we come across bewildering yet urgent outbursts in which Grant repeatedly protests that the eleventh degree ritual of the OTO involves no homosexual practices, or jaw-dropping accounts of magic workings that defy all credibility, with live baboons dragged screeching into nothingness by extra-human forces, this delivered casually, almost as after-dinner anecdote. The onslaught of compulsive weirdness in Grant’s work is unrelenting, filled with jumpy fast-cuts that remind one less of text than television: H P Lovecraft’s House Party. Each chapter an emetic gush of curdling chthonic biles and juices served up steaming, a hot shrapnel of ideas, intense and indiscriminate. A shotgun full of snails and amethysts discharged point blank into the reader’s face.

Like this:

While NOAA’s annual report shows the Arctic has lost 95 percent of its oldest, thickest ice, NASA researchers have observed ice retreat in East Antarctica—a region they’d believed was stable

New data shows that over the past three decades, the Arctic has lost 95 percent of its oldest, thickest ice. (Photo: Christopher Michel/Flickr/cc)

As the Trump administration tries to undermine the COP 24 climate talks in Poland, new U.S. government data shows that ice melt at both of the planet’s poles—driven by rising air and ocean temperatures resulting from human-caused global warming—is worse than previously thought.